There are literally hundreds of services that allow you to monitor the website for uptime, but the common problem is that they are either too costly or the free ones do not run at regular intervals. Prior to few days ago we relied heavily on montastic and monit for monitoring our website for downtimes.

The only problem was that montastic ran only once a hour and we could not get monit to run as it is supposed to run, another problem was that unlike these services we don’t run 24/7 and need sleep, so if the website goes down at a odd hour, the site would be down unless we wake up and reboot the servers.

To overcome the issue we started our hunt for a desktop base tool using which we could easily monitor our website and automate the process of rebooting the server when it suffers downtime. As always we were lucky to find a absolute stunner which fit our needs to the hilt.

Uptime Scout is the perfect solution for monitoring websites or online applications, within a small piece of software they have packed in a solution that could bring a relief to lot of webmasters. Uptime Scout is a small tray application that allows you to monitor the availability (uptime) of your website(s) and notifies you if the website (or the server) goes down.

What Is So Unique About Uptime Scout?

The best part about Uptime scout is that they run from your desktop allowing you to decide the frequency of uptime checks. The alerts are much faster since you get a popup on the screen, telling you about downtime almost instantly as they happen, you can also setup email alerts if the server goes down.

In addition to that you can monitor your website as frequently as 30 seconds.

How Can You Reboot Your Server / Perform Some Action When Your Server Goes Down?

The best thing we liked about Uptime Scout was the ability to perform a action in case your server goes down, these action may vary, but since we use a VPS we perform a action of rebooting the server, this action could be anything you may want to be.

In our case, we are running a java application that automatically reboots our server when the site goes down. The actions can be easily applied to individual sites and could be anything you want, like sending out a automated email to your hosting customer support and so on.

You can also choose to apply the action only the first time a site goes down, every subsequent downtime (before the site gets back online) would ignore the action.

Summarizing

If you are a webmaster and have your own hosting providers, we definitely recommend this software. Our thumbs and thanks to the developers for creating such a useful software and distributing it for free.